Palm Claim Chowda?

TechCrunch, AllThingsD, and many others are giving Roger McNamee a lot of crap about his claim that yesterday, the 2 year anniversary of the iPhone’s launch, would be the day that everyone who bought one of those iPhones would upgrade to a Palm Pre. Now I do think he deserves some of that crap, since the hyperbole was so extreme. But to take that claim and try to paint the Pre launch or Elevation’s Palm investment as a failure because it didn’t stand up to that hyperbole is ridiculous. The refutation of these claims is really quite simple: compare the stock performance of the leading cell phone makers over the last year:

Note that while Palm’s stock has soared, Apple’s stock is only slightly higher and the other major phone makers are down. If I was Elevation Partners, I think I’d be pretty happy with Palm’s performance relative to its competitors…